computing in the social sciences and humanities ppt

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Computing

Ua and Humaniff

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ORVILLE VERNON BURTON

Introduction: The Reni

Just as the mechanical clock is the metaphor for the early modern period and the steam engine represents the industrial revolution, the computer is the symbol of our age.' Computers affect almost every aspect of our lives, and the social sciences and humanities are no exception Computers have changed the way scholars research, write, and teach

‘The idea for this book began in 1993 at the Conference on Computing in the Social Sciences (C5893) held at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Sci- ence and Technology and sponsored by the National Center for Supercomput- ing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) NCSA director Larry Smarr had challenged social scientists to envi- sion new approaches to resolving problems using high-performance computing Smarr extended the resources of NCSA for Probe projects, which spanned a variety of social science disciplines and used high-performance computing to solve previously intractable problems The results of thirteen of these high- performance research projects were presented at CSS93

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2 ORVILLE VERNON BURTON

cof change in the larger computing world juxtaposed with the slower pace of technological adoption and adaptation in the humanities and social sciences redirected our purpose from presenting conference proceedings to providing a usable, meaningful book and multipurpose CD-ROM This book pro- vvides a bridge to those new or uncomfortable with digital media

‘Accompanying this book is a CD-ROM titled Wayfarer: Charting Advances in Social Science and Humanities Computing Wayfarer is a new concept It

contains some of the most important ideas, programs, models, and demon-

strations in humanities and social science computing and papers more suit-

ed to presentation on a CD-ROM than in a printed volume Current topics

in diverse fields are covered Whereas the nature of the academy and the differing pace of change and innovation in differemt disciplines tend to keep

complementary ideas and approaches apart, this CD-ROM is a concise over-

view (able to be updated through the Web) of where we have been, where ‘we are, and where we are going Wayfarer is intentionally eclectic, an exhibi- tion that highlights significant perspectives of the computer revolution The CD-ROM provides something for everyone, from the generalist in the humanities to the social scientist who seeks specialist programs and tools for

analysis, Edited by historians, this elaborate CD-ROM was designed for utility by Frank Baker of NCSA Wayfarer contains the papers fom this book and

many more Wayfarer features an interactive repository, functional demon-

strations, and extensive bibliographic materials (some essays from the book have more extensive reference lists than are contained in the Notes in this book.) Wayfarer expresses, in ways that scholarly papers alone cannot, the energetic quality of current computer-based and digital media-based exper- imentation and exploration of the social sciences and humanities

This book and CD-ROM examine how computers have changed the methods social scientists use and contributed to a reorientation of the craft and

how new technology is changing research in the social sciences and human-

ities In short, they explore the renaissance in computing in the humanities and social sciences Scholars have disputed whether such a renaissance has

occurred In May 1990, in an exchange of views in the Newsletter of the Or- ganization of American Historians, Walter A Sutton, professor of history at

Lamar College, took exception to early projections of a renaissance in social science computing, writing that “Orville Vernon Burton's view of ‘History's Electric Future’ seems to be unduly optimistic.”* Sutton based his opinion

on his experience with inadequate computing hardware and software, exces-

sive cost of computing equipment, lack of access among scholars to computing equipment, and imperfections and limitations in existing scanning, op-

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Introduction 3

tical character recognition, and library system software Over the last decade, however, as the renaissance has gained momentum, such frustrations have diminished The cost of computing is shrinking at an astonishing rate, and the capability of computing is increasing even more rapidly Sutton worried about the excessive cost and “a lack of administrative support for AT-class

PCs for people in the liberal arts.” Those ATs, which cost $3,000~5,000 in 1990, today are obsolete and cannot even be given away Capable 650-megahertz Pentium IH machines sold for as little as $1,200 new in 2000 In 2001 a 700-MHz system sells for $700 and a 1,000-megahertz to 1.5-gigahertz

Pentium 4 for $1,200 In January 1993 storage capacity in a 300-megabyte

hard drive cost $2.16 per megabyte; a year later it cost only 88 cents per megabyte, and in 1997 a 1.6-gigabyte hard drive cost 12.5 cents per mega-

byte, In 2000 a 60-gigabyte hard drive cost just $5.48 per gigabyte, or about

0.5 cents per megabyte In 2001, hard drives can be bought for around $100, per 30 gigabytes (or 0.33 cents per megabyte) and around $165 for a 60-

gigabyte hard drive ($2.75 per gigabyte or 0.3 cent per megabyte) Industry

estimates project a $1.00/gigabyte drive by 2003

Universities and colleges have also addressed the problem of access for all students, including those in the liberal arts Many schools offer computing labs with high-powered machines, and undergraduates often arrive on cam- pus with their own personal computers Optical character recognition systems, though still fraught with problems, have come far enough in the last few years to make their use practicable for laptops and notepads Scholars are now scanning censuses, tax records, and books into machine-readable

form Technology forecasters predict that 1,000-MIPS (imillions of instruc

tions per second) desktop machines will soon be affordable In contrast, large

mainframe computers of the mid-1980s could handle only 5-10 MIPS

Many humanists agree that the computer is valuable as an electronic library, which scholars can peruse at their convenience The National Science

Foundation, recognizing the importance of computers to libraries, made digital libraries one of its grand challenges in 1993 Today we are surprised

if library has not gone digital, and the challenge is to promote creative use

by a broader community.’ Although computers are valuable in cataloguing

information, it is the point of this book that computers are vastly more capable than mere information storage devices As tools for ordering and making sense of information, computers create an environment in which social scientists and humanists can operate

‘This renaissance in computing s not utopian Technological and philosophical problems remain, The technological difficulties will be cured by techno-

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logical improvements But what of the problems with the philosophy and culture of computers themselves and within the particular disciplines themselves? These will take longer to work out Currently, for example, differing philosophical approaches to sociology divide that discipline Problems parallel those that economics faced in the 1950s and 1960s and that history and political science faced in the late 1960s and 1970s: Are quantitative techniques an appropriate method for understanding society? Should scholars quantify ornot? Once upon a time, the debate included whether or not a scholar should even use a computer Today social scientists and humanists use computers at the office and home to take notes, organize, write, and communicate vỉa e- ‘mail with colleagues and students Today's debates now center on how to use the computer Scholarly use of computers is no longer limited to number crunching, In 1993 NCSA created Mosaic, a definitive piece of software that turned the arcane realm of the World Wide Web into a point-and-click play- ground for millions of neophytes, helping build the first mass media outlet in computing NCSA Mosaic was demonstrated at C3S93 to enthusiastic humanists and social scientists, Derivatives of Mosaic, such as Netscape Com- municator and Microsoft Explorer, now provide means of communication through the Internet with other libraries and resources throughout the world Furthermore, the increasing ease with which computers deal with texts is

bringing some social scientists closer to the textual and narrative world of the

humanities, Soon Web innovations may offer new operating systems and again narrow the distance between the sciences and the humanities

History as a discipline has long been divided as to whether it belonged to the humanities or the social sciences Now, because computers have opened exciting opportunities for historians to work with texts in new and comprehensive ways, the history profession clearly sees itself as part of the humanities The computer, which some traditional narrative historians despised in

the 1960s and 1970s because a group of “New Historians” used it for qu: titative analysis, is moving history as a discipline firmly into the humani

and away from the modeling and quantitative techniques generally assoc ated with the social sciences

C.P Snow theorized in 1959 that a dichotomy existed between the world of science and the world of humanities Optimists will acknowiedge that those ‘two worlds are converging Scientists more than ever are interested in the history of their disciplines and the paradigms that inform the way they work and think Social scientists are likewise interested in the technological revolution,

seeking perspective on the larger impact of technology on our society:*

‘The real computing renaissance begins with creative, even speculative

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Introduction 5

thinking No longer do social scientists have to alter their methods of inquiry to accommodate the computer; computers are now sufficiently flexible to accommodate the social scientist Computers can cross spatial, chronologi- cal, and interdisciplinary boundaries A social scientist can now incorporate investigations from history, sociology, geography, political science, literature, and any other discipline into one research question Technology can help answer real questions as social scientists use computers in creative ways to pursue new and previously impossible avenues of inquiry A social scientist should use the methodological tool appropriate for the particular problem under investigation Some social scientists, like some historians before them, are now standing firm against quantitative techniques and computer-derived statistical analysis, thinking that statistical analysis limits the profession But it is limited only by a lack of imagination The computer allows revelation and discovery, answers to questions previously unanswerable, And increasingly,as the chapters in this volume illustrate, today’s hardware and software are suited to all kinds of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, Indeed, the Web and the resources it offers are so much easier to use than they were in the heyday of quantitative techniques that the new technology might re- vitalize interest in structural questions for humanists and social scientists ‘Therein lies the renaissance in supercomputing

The real supercomputer is not a $10-million machine sitting in isolated splendor in a high-tech astronomy or physics laboratory; itis the tens of

ions of PCs throughout the world, which more and more are linked with mainframes, LANs, servers, databases, and each other through the Internet ‘These PCs have the computing power of more than 10,000 Cray-1 supercom- puters.® When this computing power is combined with the ease of communication among scholars, computers can effect a profound change in scholarly disciplines

This potential has been realized in specialized forums online These forums are expanding at an explosive rate One of the most influential forums is H- Net, the International On-Line Network for the Humanities and Social Sci- ‘ences Having begun as a history discussion list on the Internet at the time of C8893, where Richard Jensen, founder of H-NET, and I, as H-Net trea- surer, enlisted supporters, H-Net is now governed by an international council of scholars It enjoys the support of several institutions, notably Michigan, State University, which provides technical infrastructure and administrative staff Mark Kornbluh, a former chair of H-Net council and professor of history at Michigan State University, has succeeded Jensen as executive director Under Jensen’s and Kornbluh’s dynamic leadership, H-Net has expand-

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ed to more than 100,000 subscribers internationally with 10 million messages per month, Ithas pioneered a range of Web-based scholarly publishing ven- tures such as H-Review, which is now one of the world’s largest programs for the review of new monographs in the humanities and social sciences It

has also been a catalyst for innovative use of networked communications for delivering educational resources In 1997 the American Historical Associa~ tion awarded H-Net the James Harvey Robinson Prize for the “most out- standing contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field,”

Many subscribers are undergraduate teachers with more than a million students every semester

Scholarly forums such as H-Net are just one example of how scholars are using computers to reshape the workings of the academy Cooperation between academicians enlarges the scale and narrows the precision of scholarly inquiry; ultimately t will raise thought processes to a higher plane High- performance computing, in tandem with extremely powerful individual PCs ‘with Web resources, offers enormous opportunities for scholars to organize, analyze, and comprehend information in ways only dreamed about a few years ago

This volume isa collection of innovative thinking about computing in the

humanities and social sciences Included in this book are some of the prac-

tical and theoretical aspects of social science computing, Some of the essays offer insight into accessing the complex and growing archive of social

cence data and mapping out features of the new social science computing environment Other articles provide feedback from social science and humanities scholars already working in the new environment They describe how they have used computers to solve long-standing problems and where

of social science and humanities computing and electronic information ex-

change has changed the way academicians think about their disciplines and communicate with each other and with students

PART 1: THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

‘The first two chapters take a broad view of the renaissance in social science computing; they get to the very heart of this renaissance, the impact of computers in the classroom In chapter 1, “Technological Revolutions 1 Have

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Introduction ?

ing into the promise of the Web and the Internet, Ayers cals for using the new media in ways that are challenging intellectually rather than technologically Rather than worry about the inevitable replacement of current tech-

nology, Ayers asks social scientists to take a leading role in shaping research

‘goals, He urges humanists to create the next revolution in computer use with

innovative accomplishments.”

Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig also address the idea of the renaissance and ask whether the new technology is revolutionary in its applicability to learning In chapter 2, “Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals,” Bass and Rosenzweig place the digital revolution in historical perspective and address crucial issues for teaching social sciences in the new millennium Chapter 2 was originally a White

Paper prepared for the Department of Education, Forum on Technology in

K-12 Education: Envisioning a New Future, December 1, 1999.‘ Although

Bass and Rosenzweig focus on K-12 and teaching with information technology, the discussion is applicable to all teaching in the digital age, including

the college level Rosenzweig and Bass draw from their own experiences with

workshops sponsored by the American Studies Crossroads Project, the New

‘Media Classroom, and the Library of Congress's American Memory Fellows

program and from a nationwide survey of Americans conducted in 1994 Rass, a professor of English, and Rosenzweig, a professor of history, explore three frameworks that promote active learning Scholars too seldom talk about what goes wrong, but this essay also warns about pitfalls This essay is

a must for anyone who cares about teaching and learning the social sciences

and humanities in the twenty-first century

PART 2: COMPUTING AND NEW ACCESS TO SOCIAL SCIENCE DATA

‘The next two chapters illustrate how scholars have developed and are envisioning the information infrastructure so that new approaches will yield faster

and more useful results Much of the power of computingis realized over the

Internet Some research activities can be accomplished at a fraction of their

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content analysis programs and even programs that function on human cog- nitive models These essays are not about what social scientists predict for the

future but about how social scientists use computers here and now to make

enormous and unprecedented advances And because this knowledge is not

limited to one time and place or to one dataset but is transferable, scholars

can build on each other's work These chapters showcase some of the possibilities that await social scientists willing to use datasets These authors challenge scholars to expand the scope of their research

William Sims Bainbridge outlines the general promise of surveys on the Internet in chapter 3, “Validity of Web-Based Surveys: Explorations with Data from 2,382 Teenagers.” Scholars are beginning to grapple with this new development of Web resources, and Web-based surveys present special prob-

lems and opportunities for researchers.’ Bainbridge addresses a very current social science problem, and he uses a specific example to draw general con-

clusions that are applicable to the social science computing community Too often academicians, when writing about computing, are theoretical, and here Bainbridge offers us practical solutions Bainbridge was centrally involved

with Survey 2000, the extensive Web-based survey carried out in late 1998,

by the National Geographic Society By grounding his study in the reality of Survey 2000, he is able to answer general problems about all Web-based sur-

veys and provide a detailed application His study of teenagers’ responses and

the gender differences illustrates a sensitive and creative treatment of the reliability and the dilemmas associated with Web-based surveys Bainbridge concludes with a valuable, broad view of how experimental methods and stringent sampling can be incorporated in future Web-based surveys In addition, Bainbridge provides on Wayfarer a set of four modules he created to help with Web-based surveys: “The Year 2100,” “Self-Esteem,” “Experi-

ence,” and “Beliefs.”

Solidly rooted in the relationship of modern computing and scholarship,

chapter 4, “Computer Environments for Content Analysis: Reconceptualiz~ ing the Roles of Humans and Computers,” by William Evans stresses that the

computer is more than a took; itis an environment for content analysis In a

thought-provoking essay with implications for all social scientists, Evans rejects the idea of a computer as a sophisticated adding machine, external

and isolated from the social scientist, and he recommends that social scientists begin to conceptualize the computer as an entity within which the so-

ial scientist operates Computing is not the same thing as conceptualizing

the computation Evans recommends a computer system design that supports

a wide variety of human coding tasks and says that content analysis should

adopt artifical intelligence techniques.”

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Introduction ° PART 3: COMPUTERS, SOCIAL SCIENCE, HUMANITIES,

AND THE IMPACT OF THE NEW SOCIAL TERRAIN

‘The third section in this book contains two chapters that describe how computers provide social scientists and humanists with a working environment As awesome as computing power is in processing numbers and grappling with large datasets, computing benefits to humanists and social scientists go beyond that power Computers are flexible, able to store, transmit, use, and create information The rapid pace of changing technology challenges us to exploit these machines efficiently Using computers as a tool that stimulates, creative thinking should help solve real-world problems

In chapter 5, “Electronic Texts in the Historical Profession: Perspectives from Across the Scholarly Spectrum,” Wendy Plotkin does what no one else has done In a useful and informative survey of the state of historical publ cations in the Internet, she discusses the ways in which the Internet has af- fected historical research and teaching She looks in particular at the value of electronic primary texts as a historical tool to enhance analysis Plotkin traces the development of the textual resources available to the historian in

electronic form and notes that electronic texts have two principal advantages:

they allow broad, easy access to valuable primary materials from remote lo- cations, and they allow systematic searches for words, phrases, or concepts

Plotkin also looks at the disadvantages of electronic texts Some scholars believe that the physical appearance of the original text is important, some

doubt the ability of the computer to improve upon textual analysis,and many

question the durability of electronic texts Plotkin delves into the attitudes, of other members of the scholarly community toward electronic texts and the problems electronic texts create for publishers, including cost and copy- right issues Plotkin concludes that these questions may be moot in the near future simply because government and business are shifting rapidly from paper-based communication to electronic communication Soon electronic texts may comprise much historical evidence, which would increase the incentives for developing text analysis tools For any person interested in

using scholarly resources on the Internet, Plotkin’s essay is indispensable

We now know that one of the dynamic and largely unexpected explosions

‘of computing power has been the rapid exchange of information through computer networks Attacking a lttle-considered area—computer-mediated

social activism—Daniel J Myers, in “Social Activism through Computer Networks” (chapter 6), turns the tables on these networks by using them to

analyze the people who use networks Myers examines computer-assisted communication and computer networks in the formation and function of

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10 ORVILLE VERNOH BURTON

social movements and collective behavior, noting that very little research has

been done on the processes by which activists use computers and the results

of this use Myers outlines key characteristics of computer-mediated communication and the ramifications for social movements He also identifies potentially fruitful areas for research using the activist computer forum

PART 4: PHILOSOPHICAL AND ETHICAL CONCERNS: OF THE CULTURE OF COMPUTING

‘This final section addresses some consequences and warnings for the renaissance in social science computing No renaissance is perfect Every advance brings inherent problems, usually unforeseen, that must be addressed before the promise of a renaissance can be realized Bass and Rosenzweig remind- ed us of the disadvantages minorities and historically black colleges experienced in the technological revolution Bainbridge discussed how women were lagging behind especially in the sciences, but saw some improvement In chapter 7, “Creating Cybertrust: Illustrations and Guidelines,” H Jeanie Taylor and Cheris Kramarae discuss an ultimate question about this new technological renaissance: Whom does it benefit? Looking specifically at men’s roles in defining and using computers, Taylor and Kramarae consider a variety of problems and offer a list of concrete solutions With so litte study of gender and minority participation in the di ital age, the issues Taylor and Kramarae address are significant and call out for more research and discussion,

In chapter 8, “Electronic Networks for International Research Collabora- tion: Implications for Intellectual Property Protection in the Early Twenty-first Century,” Carole Ganz-Brown cautions that traditional concepts of owner- ship of information are being challenged, if not overrun, by the rapid growth of electronic networks In this informative and provocative essay, Ganz-Brown points out that electronic networks have exposed an inherent contradiction in the doctrine of intellectual property: Intellectual property systems aim to promote public disclosure of intellectual works while conferring on the creators the exclusive rights to distribute their works With a lucid explanation of the legal issues surrounding intellectual property protection, Ganz-Brown raises an issue that scholars must confront as they embark upon the renaissance in social science computing

It is possible that the humanities and social sciences, because they have not traditionally made heavy use of computing power, will use computers more creatively than other disciplines Social scientists will bring fresh perspectives and ask, rightly so, what the computer can do for social science rather than

women’s and mino1

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Introduction „

what the social scientist can do for the computer Although knowledge of computer operation and programming language is valuable to social scientists, the principal goal of social science is the acquisition of relevant know!-

edge Previously, social scientists and humanists had difficulties using com-

puters creatively because they first had to set their projects aside and gain detailed knowledge of computers Just as automobiles were of limited use when it was necessary to be a roadside mechanic as well asa driver, the promise held out by computers was ephemeral as long as scholars and teachers also had to be computer scientists As computing technology has evolved, these barriers have fallen Computers are now accessible to every social science and humanities scholar Despite all the monumental gains in computers as cussed in this book of essays, the technology will never again be as primitive as itis right now; technology will only continue to improve These essays illustrate the hopes and the frustrations of computing This is the brink of a

new age, and the future of the social sciences and humanities calls for opti-

ism The renaissance is upon us

“WAYFARER”

‘The accompanying CD-ROM, Wayfarer, includes multimedia entries such as

the Global jukebox, by folklorist Alan Lomax, interesting to read about but alive, vibrant, and spirited on the CD-ROM This interactive system maps the universe of human expressive behavior with an illustrated geography of song and dance that illuminates the worldview of historians of culture Even in its prototype stage, the Global Jukebox allows a user to explore the main

regions of human song (with excerpts available from about 130 songs and

30 dances) to explore their distinctive characteristics and acquire an appre- ciative overview of music and dance in their global cultural settings

Brian Orland’s essay, “Visualizing Wildlife Population Dynamics: The Powerfull Owl,” demonstrates the efficacy of the World Wide Web and CD- ROM in exhibiting papers Orland uses the capability of online publishing

to express complex problems with interactive visual displays He created bird

population models to exemplify interactions between the vegetative and

wildlife components of forest ecology Concrete examples bring clarity to simple correlations as well as more compiex log or U-shaped relationships, and computer interface tools and interactive representations display these processes Orland describes his creation of a museum exhibit where a user can manipulate variables relating to an owl population and view the effects in various graphic forms This project taps into the new power of interactive multimedia, with significant benefits for teaching and learning

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Other treats on the CD-ROM include anthropologist and former Social

Science Computing Association president Doug White s PGRAPH, a kinship network analysis program that studies and analyzes marriage and family

structures within a given community, Sociologists Gillian Stevens and Tim

Futing Liao present programs useful to demographers Political scientists

Michael MeBurnett and Thad A Brown present their paper, “The Emergence of Elites through Adaptive Interaction and the Consequences for Stability in Political Science,” along with simulation models investigating the role of elites in the American political order, Using a series of dynamic lattice computer models, McBurnett and Brown explore how they believe interdependent elite hierarchies develop and influence our political system

Another exciting entry in the Wayfarer collection is River Web, a multime-

dia interactive archive of information on the Mississippi River that is particularly well suited for use in distance education This interdisciplinary collaboration, which I directed and which is managed and maintained by David

Herr and fan Binnington, graduate students in history at UIUC, brings to-

gether resources, information, and technology to explore the history, culture,

and science of the Mighty Mississippi in a unique and significant milicu The CD-ROM includes one portion of a “landing site” along the Mississippi River,

East St Louis This East St Louis site incorporates the history of the city, the

musical scene including the blues, the development of steamboats on the Mississippi, and contemporary East St Louis with its community and neigh- borhood projects Together with the East St Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP), an endeavor of the University of Illinois Department of Land- scape Architecture, RiverWeb brings a missing past to residents of both the city and the world, providing information from yesteryear that people can

use today

Harnessing the potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web has become a primary concern among humanists In “The ‘Pictures of Health’ Project,” Paul Turnbull, elected the first president of H-Net in 2000, reflects ‘on using the Web in teaching the history of the social sciences, truly part of the current renaissance Turnbull's article deals with networked digital information systems and the ways in which computing is increasingly being used in the social sciences and humanities and the challenges we consequently face ‘Turnbull is asking the most relevant question about computer technolo;

How is it connected to the changes now affecting scholarly culture? He offers us a case study in which the technology was used creatively to address disturbing assumptions about the relationships between technology and so-

cial change He discusses the motivation, aims, and outcomes of integrating

a series of online interactive learning exercises, tutorials, and consultation

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Introduction 13 fa ties within an advanced undergraduate course at James Cook Universi- ty Essentially, he set students to explore how statistical techniques and new

technologies such as photography were used by several leading nineteenth- century social scientists, Students were encouraged to see how anxieties about population increase, industrialization, and the growth of cities found expression in the knowledge these scientists produced In the process, students were invited to reflect on how their own understanding and uses of new technol-

ogies might be subject to the influences of wider economic and cultural forces

‘Turnbull's essay highlights the ways in which virtual teaching and learning is developing in similar cultural contexts Turnbull discusses Web-based teaching and offers practical experience from an extensive project by one of

the leading scholars in these technologies Moreover, the same type of pro-

cedure Turnbull discusses is necessary today for anyone wanting to teach history in an Internet-based environment The international context of Turn- bull’ essay is especially important because U.S scholars need to be aware of the different problems faced in different educational contexts, and this essay

gives an American audience some insight into the particular problems and opportunities of computers ina different cultural context Wayfarer users will

be able to explore Turnbull's Web site

In “Representing Metadata with Intelligent Agents: An Initial Prototype,” Albert F Anderson, 1996 president of the Social Science Computing Associ- ation, and co-authors Edward Brent and G Alan Thompson deal with the problems of large datasets such as the U.S Bureau of the Census Public Use

Microdata Sample (PUMS), integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS),

and Supersample This paper and these scholars’ work are visionary as they

describe two prototype modules and their PDQ-Explore system, which works

san active agent This paper addresses what the Web offers scholars in the way of data sources and suggests better ways to access large stores of infor-

mation, Where might computers take social scientists, or are these paths un-

predictable? What can social scientists do with computers, and what computing tools and skills do social scientists need? Social scientists have used the computer as a machine for statistical analysis or storing large (and often un- wwieldy) quantities of information, but this paper focuses instead on information management and manipulation Users of Wayfarer may use this prototype readily to generate tables from millions of records in a matter of seconds The PDQ-Explore system represents a realization of the promise of high-

performance information and computing technology to work with large,

complex datasets, without the previous penalties of excessive time, cost, and

technical prowess.""

William deB Mills, in “Forests or Trees: Clear Thinking about Social Sci-

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ence Systems,” discusses how to use computers creatively He presents a set

of generic dimensions along which all biological systems can be compared

Mills argues that this focus on system performance in generic dimensions allows insight into the underlying causes of policy problems, insights that

might otherwise be obscured by overemphasis on superficial descriptive details On Wayfarer, Mills includes his software System 101, which readers may use to implement his carefully described approach

In addition to such state-of-the-art essays, Wayfarer provides a summary ‘of the major trends and issues of the computing revolution for social science of the last decade Selected revised papers from CSS93, as well as updated

papers from later CSS conferences and solicited other papers, are on Way- {farer, Some of the essays are placed in their historical context; for example, a

historical snapshot of where social scientists believed they were and where

they predicted computing was going in 1995 is found in Bruce Tonn, “Us-

ing the National Information Infrastructure for Social Science, Education,

and Informed Decision Making: A White Paper.” Ton, former president of

the Social Science Computing Association, held a round-table discussion at

C3893 of “Grand Challenges for the Social Sciences” where participants de- bated issues in social science computing, From that discussion, Tonn began

a White Paper elucidating the challenges for social science computing and computing needs for the next generation,

‘The preceding examples are just a sampling of the programs available on

the CD-ROM Other authors in the written volume have also included pro-

grams on the CD-ROM These programs make visible and concrete what the chapters in this printed volume portend Videos, graphs, color pictures, and

illustrations of geographic information systems (GIS illustrations} accom-

pany the essays Applications and datasets give readers the first-hand excitement of the research as the authors and research teams share their experiences

Wayfarer also has connections to many World Wide Web sites, including

a link to a Web site devoted to the CD-ROM itself In addition, it contains a

collection of sites in itself, for those working remotely with no Internet ac-

cess and those with a slow Internet connection, these offline Web sites make it possible to appreciate fully the nature of the material For those with In-

ternet access, Wayfarer's Web links move seamlessly from the CD-ROM to

the Web, enabling the reader to experience the full power of the medium Wayfarer is intended to benefit those interested in assessing how to har- ness effectively the Internet and computers for teaching and research, Allin all, wonders await the readers willing to try Wayfarer, readers willing to en-

ter into the renaissance in social science and humanities computing

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Introduction 5 NOTES

1.1, David Bolter, Turng’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)

2 Orville Vernon Burton, “History's Electric Future,” in OAH Newsletter 17-4 (Nover- ber 1989): 12-13, replied to by Walter A Sutton, “Another View: History's Electric Fu- ture,” OAH Newslerter 18:2 (May 1990): 6

3 Another challenge is convincing th latest generation of college students that not all, information is online Students often are surprised that libraries have holdings and archives that are not available in digital format 4.C.P Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1965) Part 1, the Rede Lecture, was published in 1959, See also the cri tique by E.R Leavisand Michael Yudkin, Two Cultures? The Significance of CP Snow and are Essay om Sir Charles Snow's Rede Lecture (New York: Pantheon, 1963),

5 Larry L Smart, “The Computational Science Revolution: Technology, Methodolo- and Sociology.” in High-Speed Computing: Scientific Applications and Algorithm De- sign, ed, Robert B, Withelmson (Urbana: University of llinois Press, 1988); Williams 1 Kaufmann It and Larry L Smarr, Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science (New York: Scientific American Library/W, H, Freeman, 1993)

6, See Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, “Envisioning the Futur: Artsand Lettersin the Digital Age.” on Wayfarer 7 See Ayers’s own technological revolution, “The Valley of the Shadows,” an award- winning maltimedia study ofthe Civil War as experienced in two communities, North- ‘ecm Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Southern Staunton, Virginia, on Wayfarer

8 Ancarlie version ofthis essay first appeared in The Journal of Education 181:3 (1999): 41-61

9 See the special issue of Social Science Computer Review 18:4 (Winter 2000) on "Su: vey and Statistical Computing in the New Milennium

10 See also Lyn Richards, “Qualitative Software Meets Qualitative Method: QSR's NUDVIST 4 and NVivo as Results,” and the accompanying content analysis programs, 'QSRNUD*IST4.0and NVivo, on Wayfarer Qualitative Solutions and Research's NUDIST 4.0 program (originally programmed by Tom Richards and designed by Lyn Richards) and NVivo are multifunctional software systems for developing supporting, and man- aging qualitative data analysis projects With NUD"IST 4.0 and NVivo, scholars ean analyze unstructured data, such as text from interviews, historical or legal documents, ‘or nontextual documentary material such as videotapes

11, See also “Interactive Access to Large Census Data Sets,” by Albert F Anderson and his son, Paul H Anderson, and try the PDQ EXPLORE application on Wayfarer

12, For further exploration of Mill's argument that we should understand comput- «rs as tools to enhance creativity rather than devices to improve our efficiency see “Work ing Smarter: Computers as Stimulants for Human Creativity” and his other applications con Wayfarer

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PART 1

The

Digital

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EDWARD L AYERS

1 /¢ Technological Revolutions | Have Known

Historians are trained to see things in the context of change, but even a

historian might find it hard to gain a sense of perspective on the technological changes sweeping over us these days The machinery itself is evolving with astonishing speed, and the larger culture seems obsessed with the evolution

Articles on the latest high-tech stock miracle fill the business pages while

advertisements for automobiles and sport leagues bear their World Wide Web addresses like badges of honor Books and magazines for and against the new ‘media pepper the bestseller lists, and how-to books on computing dominate

new sections of bookstores

‘The effects of the new technology in the classroom receive their share of attention as well While the computer companies and politicians fall over one another with promises and proposals to equip classrooms with as many machines as possible, ominous voices warn that we are ushering in the end of

real education with such innovations Teachers will be replaced with machines,

they warn, human interaction supplanted by keyboards and screens Teach- ers view the changes warily, eager for the stimulation and excitement computers can bring yet leery of inflated expectations and skewed funding, Higher

‘education is, if anything, even more confused and ambivalent than its primary

and secondary counterparts There, some scholars and teachers are eagerly in-

novating with the newest media while others hold it in open contempt

Educators at every level have been burned before, when gadgets ranging

from filmstrips to overhead projectors to televisions have been ballyhooed as the saviors of the American classroom The computers that have occupied corners of classrooms for the last decade have made some impact on mat-

ters involving rote learning but have not lived up to their earlier billing Our

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20 EDWARD L AYERS

classrooms still mainly involve the scraping of one rock against another, chalk

‘on blackboard Has the time finally arrived when the big changes will be felt? Have we achieved critical mass? Are we on the verge of a fundamental change in the boundaries and possibilities of the classroom? If so, what role might those of us in research universities play?

‘Many academics who came of professional age some time between the late 1960s and early 1980s have already experienced what felt like—at the time, at least—three electronic revolutions As a historian attracted to the poten-

tial of computing since the 1970s, I have seen these changes at close range, Like others of my generation, I confronted mainframe computers before personal computers I remember how impressive it felt at the computer cen-

ter: the heavy metal machinery, the hard math done automatically, the promise of being freed from uncertainty and imprecision True, I had to copy records from dusty originals to coding sheets and then to brittle punchcards, but the excitement when all the cards were ready for batch processing was, worth it One made a ritualistic sacrifice of the cards to the priestly atten-

dant behind the glass wall, then waited in a room where it always seemed to

bea fluorescent-lit 3 a.at Eventually reams of paper began to pour out, perhaps the findings on which so much depended After proudly bearing the impressively large stack of paper through the rows of computer science grad-

uate students, the humanist eagerly opened the stack to see what revolution

in historical understanding might be revealed in the columns and numbers Unfortunately, seeing the entire stack of paper filled with one message repeat- ed 2,789 times—error number 17—was not as edifying as one had hoped Eventually, though, I figured out the machinery enough to get some reason- able-looking numbers for a dissertation

Looking back, the incongruity in this first computer revolution is obvi-

‘ous The same dissertation that drew on a computer the size of a 747 for its

data manipulation had to be translated into English with a used Adler Satel- lite portable electric typewriter It was a tactile experience, with the grind-

ing little motor and belts, the keys interlocking tenaciously, the pockmarked

surface where wet correction fluid had been typed over And it was intellectually challenging as well, for it was not always easy to find another nine-let-

ter word for, say, “lassitude” when, against all odds, “lassitude” appeared in

consecutive paragraphs Despite such obstacles, I managed to write enough ofa dissertation with such a machine to get a job

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Technological Revolutions | Have Known, a

professors could gain access to the two machines in what quickly became known as the Wang Room There, we simply could not get over the fact that ‘we could delete words we had written many pages back We could delete “lassitude” every time it appeared, even replacing it with a five-letter word if we chose! It was miracle, even better than number-crunching, because these were the humanists’ familiar and beloved words that could be manipulated so easily

Nothing was perfect, of course A flicker of lightning in the next county often triggered a complete breakdown of the machines; the daisy wheel print-

er ate ribbons and daisy wheels the way the computer in graduate school ate paper; the disks, the size of small pizzas, seemed to erase themselves in the

filing cabinet drawer; the cutting-edge Wang format soon proved to be a dead end in word-processing evolution Nevertheless, once one had processed ‘words, there was no going back

In 1985, thanks to the beneficence of my university, I got my very own machine at home and became a part of the Internet revolution To my de- light and the envy of my friends, it had a color monitor rather than the murky green of the Wang, its own actual hard drive able to hold 10 entire megabytes, and—shades of the future—a 2,400-baud modem Trying to live up to such a machin, I learned to use yet another mainframe computer interactively, punchcards having been thrown on the computing trash heap along with the ‘Wang [taught myself multiple regression analysis and other things contrary to my character and abilities But the real excitement came in the discovery of electronic mail The combination of written language, informality, efficien- cwand, in the mid-1980s, the feeling of being among the information technology elite proved surprisingly satisfying And when the university's card

catalog came online I thought we had approached the limits of technological progress

By then, the first wo computer revolutions had been completely domes- ticated The computer had become an appliance, about as exciting—and as, essential—as the coffee maker that made my day as productive as possible That was all the contact I wanted with electronic machinery I had had

enough of number crunching and SPSS runs I was planning a new, non-

electronic project, a project that would take me back to ground level, a local study in which I knew the names of people It seemed clear to me that ‘my mild interest in computers made me something of a dinosaur in the age after the linguistic turn I wanted to do the sort of highly inflected, nuanced, individualized history that had attracted me to social history in the first

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2 EDWARD L AYERS

But the machines, like so many cyborgs, tracked me down one more time ‘Trying to achieve a token balance on the committee that oversees computing at my university, they appointed me—a humanist—to occupy some space ‘on acommittee dominated by scientists, physicians, and engineers At first | was befuddled by the lingo, but something interesting soon came up: IBM ‘was interested in helping computing at the university and wanted our com

mittee to suggest something We batted it around for a while until 1 timo-

rously noted that many of us in the humanities and social sciences had no ‘computers on our desks at all There was some good-natured joshing among,

the physicists and medical imaging specialists about aid to the third world

‘of computing, but what could we do for such backward people who showed so little interest in helping themselves? Almost all my humanist colleagues seemed content with what little computing they had No clamor of discon- tent arose from the quiet offices where pens still scratched on paper

Slowly, though, some forward-thinking people in computer science begat

to think that maybe computing in the humanities might be the most exciting frontier of all What if we really could use computers to help make sense of the great store of human knowledge and striving locked away in archives, and books? What if computers were just getting good enough for humanists 10 use, now that they could deal with images as easily as they could with

linear numbers and letters, now that they were networked, now that they had

enough storage space to hold the vast and messy stuff historians habitually collected?

With this premise, IBM agreed to donate a number of RISC workstations, a server, and a technical advisor to create something we decided, after much debate, to call the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities Al-

‘most against my will, | was posted on the electronic frontier, armed with net-

working, digitization, JPEGs, and SGML even before Mosaic and the World Wide Web became household words For the last several years I have been overseeing a project based in that institute 1 converted my small-scale, mate, handmade community study into a large archive on the World

‘Web and on CD-ROM It is now known as the Valley of the Shadow Project

and it has involved more than twenty people working to fill up several gi-

gabytes of electronic storage with historical data

‘Once again I’m a true believer, eyes burning with fervor, brimming with

enthusiasm, just as I was for the big mainframe of 1978, the sleek Wangs of

1981, and the interconnected IBM clone of 1985 We look back on those

machines with a mixture of contempt and nostalgia; we will never be so in-

nocent again as we were before We know from painful experience that to-

day's miracles will be tomorrow's embarrassments or, if they succeed, mun-

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Technological Revolutions | Have Known 2B

dane paper clips We have learned from those earlier revolutions that revo-

lutions do not always happen at the speed people predict or want From one

point of view, we have seen blistering speed; from the other, things have moved slowly Computing power and storage have increased dramatically,

and universities have been wired, Word processing and e-mail and have be-

come staples of life for many professors and students But the failures are pretty obvious, too

Skepticism and even resistance to all things electronic by many human-

ists and even social scientists endures and even grows; a sort of passive ag- gression flourishes There has been too much hype, too many commercials showing dolphins leaping out of computer screens Its unfortunate that what computers, including networked computers, can do best is not particularly valued or necessary right now: providing more information, more specialized knowledge If you want stuff, the Web has it But the Web gives every-

thing equal weight and authority, from conspiracy theorists to the federal

government, Fortunately, the Web is too slow to be very satisfying over a ‘modem, negating some of the appeal to the impatient young The intellectual changes widely predicted to have accompanied widespread computing have not The quantitative techniques so widely predicted as the wave of the future in the 1960s are now almost invisible within the historical profession;

they have been replaced with a fascination with even closer attention to, of all things, words and texts Students still turn to books for authority, still stri

to write linear prose, and still print out much of what they discover online Only fraction of professors have integrated any form of electronic enhance- ments into their classes

So should humanists get out of the way? Should historians and literary

scholars, anthropologists and poets put our energies toward what we already

know how to do in traditional media, valuing that work as a humane coun- terweight to the arcadelike values of this new technology? Some of us should ‘There is no compelling reason for most teachers and scholars to throw them-

selves into the gears of the new machine Search tools and e-mail can be help- ful to almost everyone, to be sure, and few writers of nonfiction long for the

days before word processors, but hours devoted to integrating things elec-

tronic do not always pay off Thus far, so-called electronic classrooms have

offered only limited returns; most multimedia lectures often are not worth the investment of money and time they demand

Some people have asked whether the Internet and the Web are like the

citizens’ band radio craze of the 1970s, except that you have to type rather

than talk with a countrified accent But today’s technology more closely re-

sembles what began as another technological fad: high fidelity In the early

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24 EDWARD L AYERS

1950s one had to be a real nerd to care about woofers and tweeters; the records stamped “HiFi” were designed to show off what full stereo could do Trains roared through your living room or birds called in the distance But now high-quality sound reproduction is everywhere, from our cars to ‘our homes to our offices to our malls to our televisions to our pockets More than likely, that is how computers—or whatever we call them a few years

from now—will evolve Soon, they will be everywhere, taken for granted,

boring,

That is just what we need As long as the machine itself is a fetish item, it will repel as much as attract, engendering fear as much as affection As long as the machine is a separate box needing elaborate maintenance and full attention, it will be hard to integrate effectively into teaching As long as the machine is held up as an alternative to traditional learning, it will be seen as

‘challenge and an affront to proven ways to sharing knowledge It is not until

we find ways to integrate electronic teaching into our established rhythms, strategies, and purposes that the very real potential of the new media will

begin to be realized

Perhaps the first step is to dispense with the idea that the new forms of learning will necessarily displace others Each kind of interaction between student and teacher accomplishes something unique It might be useful to

think of each form of learning located on a grid, with group and individual

learning at the ends of one axis, active and passive learning at the poles of the other Americans take as a matter of faith that learning that is both individual and active is best, and that which is group and passive is worst But

even passive learning can be effective The most passive and isolating mech-

anism of all, television, has taught millions of people many things, some of

them useful Despite the criticism so often heaped on live lectures, they ac-

complish important and valuable purposes The lecturer dramatizes, embod-

ies the intellectual content and excitement of the material The lecturer acts

cout the appeal and importance of the information, which could otherwise be presented more effectively in print Generations of students at every college in the country eagerly compete to get into the best lectures, knowing that they are something more than television and more satisfying than many smaller classes with discussion

If lectures are at one end of the group versus individual axis, reading is at

the other Reading is the most individualized, active, and reflective intellectu- alactivity and as such is the measure for intellectual work in general Reading can also be passive and boring, with the reader trapped in language, pacing,

and organization that hold little appeal and convey little useful information

‘When critics decry computers’ displacement of reading, they tend to judge it

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Technological Revolutions | Have Known, a5

against the best that reading can be rather than the average In fact, a computer is more like reading than a lecture A person using digital information, like a reader, tends to be alone and actively engaged in the information be-

fore him or her The major difference between reading and using a computer

isthat computers do not seem to be friendly to reflection The computer, unlike a text, is built for action; it sits there humming, waiting, demanding that you

punch some key or click some button it is distracting, perpetually promising,

something more interesting than your own unfocused thoughts or the words currently before you on the screen,

Iniits demand for interactivity, in fact, the computer bears greater resem-

blance to a discussion group than it does to reading, Although a discussion, like alecture, benefits from the physical presence of other people, from body language, it does not necessarily depend on them Some of the most successful uses of information technology for teaching have been group discussions

based on typing into a computer Students and teachers claim that such dis-

cussions bring in a higher proportion of participants than traditional classrooms, that shy students will speak up in ways they would not otherwise, that the discussion tends to be less focused on the professor Anyone with even a slow modem and a monochrome screen can participate in sequential discussions of themes of common interest Unlike the World Wide Web, this text-

based technology is inexpensive in time and in machinery, both to produce and to consume It is an incremental technology, partaking of the benefits of reading and writing as well as the benefits of interconnectivity It involves active, group learning disguised as individual effort

Another incremental technology is the CD-ROM Just a couple of years

ago, CD-ROMs were being written off by the cognoscenti as the eight-track

tapes of information technology Unlike information on the Internet, CD- ROMs are physical commodities, bound in plastic, static On the other hand, unlike information on the Internet, they are fast, fluid, and local Given the current state of the Internet, CD-ROMS' positive qualities often outweigh their negative ones Anyone who wants to present large images, to create a unique and compelling visual environment, use sound intensively, or use

customized search tools is driven toward CD-ROM Even those engaged in

producing CD-ROMs recognize that they are a transitional technology, but

the transition may take longer than anyone had expected Until the networks and the machines at the receiving end can transmit enormous files as easily as television currently does, there will be a place for CD-ROMs They are

currently on the individual and active parts of the learning grid, but recent

advances permit users to marry those benefits with those of the World Wide

Web: connection, conversation, collaboration, and expandability That mar-

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26 EDWARD L AYERS

riage permits students to toggle between individual and group learning,

reflection and activity

That toggling may be the major advantage of the new media They are protean, able to behave like a lecture or a book, able to foster individual or group activity The new media should not be thought of as alternatives, re~ bukes, o traditional learning, but rather as ways to bridge some of the dis-

tances between those time-proven ways of teaching

‘The new media are simultaneously in their infancy and in their old age No one has created a CD-ROM or Web site yet that can hold its awn against a really good book or film The World Wide Web, the most heavily discussed manifestation of the new technology, bears family resemblance to the original Volkswagen Beetle It runs, and it can even be spruced up so that itis fun todrive and iook at, but it remains a Beetle, wheezing to get up hills, possess- ing little storage capacity, and threatening serious damage in a crash Veter- ans of the computer revolutions of the last fifteen years cannot help but see the Web with the eyes of someone five years from now, simultaneously impressed with Java and embarrassed by being impressed, knowing that soon it

‘will seem as primitive as Pong To those of us who remember batch jobs, di

sy wheels, and monochrome, it still seemsa slight miracle that pictures, sound,

and video can come over our phone lines But even that novelty wears off

So how do we handle this new medium, so tempting and so ruthless, so postmodern in its simultaneous newness and obsolescence? There are some ‘obvious truths: Use standard image formats, remain flexible, and look around But there are other problems and issues Pethaps these new media necessi- tatea compensatory style of writing, bending to the problems of nonuniform page sizes, page breaks, and short attention spans, maybe by presenting itself in shorter pieces, maybe by taking on the nonlinearity of hypertext Or maybe new media writing should emphasize its traditional strengths of coherence and continuity Maybe the computer screen should not be considered a place for serious, sustained writing at all until itis more portable and wirelessly

interconnected

‘We need to give users the information and the techniques they need to handle the complexity of large databases, but such information threatens to swell to the size of DOS user’s guides The basic metaphor for the current networks is “surfing,” but deep projects require breaking the surface and diving instead of skimming across the tap We need to give people a place to gather what they have learned, a place to assemble their new knowledge into larger and more durable constructs than lists of bookmarks We need to use machines of great efficiency to generate creative inefficiency Historians, for example, provide information that is inevitably dirty, contradictory, incor-

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Technological Revolutions | Have Known a7

rect, and incomplete in a medium that prides itself on quickness, capacious- ness, and attractiveness, Historical evidence was not created for the computer, so itis often an awkward fit between tidy machinery and smeared newspa-

per type, blurred handwriting, torn photographs, and thousands of sources,

none of which were designed to fit together by their original creators

‘To academics who have internalized the conventions of the various forms

of scholarly discourse—the article, the review, the monograph, the lecture— the new media can be confusing and even threatening We know a good book ‘when we read one Do the new media call for new standards? The intellectual standards seem to be the same: originality, thorough grounding in the field, clarity of expression, But the standards of presentation in the new media are certainly different, whether we want them to be or not We cannot judge a Web site by its cover—or its heft, its publisher's imprint, or the blurbs it wears

‘Whatever a project's scale and level of complexity, new media should meet, several standards to justify the extra effort they take to create, disseminate, and use We might as well admit that they are not as good as established media

for some purposes They cannot present a linear argument or narrative nearly

as well asa book; indeed, they are generally not good for presenting substan- tial bodies of text And they cannot convey reactive, personal energy asa good lecture or discussion group can

However, the new media can do things that traditional media cannot, and that is what should be emphasized in their creation, New media should be challenging intellectually but not technologically; if you need a user's man- ul, they are too difficult to use New media should do things one cannot do with print pages; hypertext links, personal annotation, and effective searching tools rea bare minimum They should be flexible; if a new media project merely poses a few problems and afew solutions, students cannot be expected to find it very appealing for very long New media should permit points of accomplishment along the way; a project should not take hours of investment

before it pays a dividend New media should offer opportunities for collaboration; one of the great strengths of network-based projects is that they are open-ended, able to benefit from joint effort and imagination New media

should be cumulative; users can enrich the project, leaving behind a new insight, discovery, or criticism on which others can build If a new media project can provide these benefits, then the form in which it is currently trans- mitted will soon cease to be such an issue

The lessons of the several minor revolutions we have witnessed over the

last two decades is this: The technology will rapidly evolve no matter what we do We have to decide what purposes we want to accomplish with the

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28 EDWARD L AYERS

current state of the art and plunge in, with the full knowledge that we are chasing something we can never catch To compensate for that inevitable frustration, we can take pleasure and satisfaction from knowing that we are participating, in however minor a role, in some of the more interesting

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RANDY BASS AND ROY ROSENZWEIG

2 / Rewiring the History and Social Studies

Classroom: Needs, Frameworks,

Dangers, and Proposals

Within five years of Alexander Graham Bell's first display of his telephone

at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Scientific American promised that the new

device would bring a greater “kinship of humanity” and “nothing less than

‘a new organization of society.” Others were less sanguine, worrying that tele-

phones would spread germs through the wires, destroy local accents, and give authoritarian governments listening box in the homes of their subjects The Knights of Columbus fretted that phones might wreck home life, stop peo-

ple from visiting friends, and create a nation of slugs who would not stir from their desks.!

Extravagant predictions of utopia or doom have accompanied most new

communication technologies, and the same rhetoric of celebration and de-

nunciation has enveloped the Internet For Wired magazine publisher Louis Rossetto, the digital revolution promises “social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” According to Iraq's offi- cial government newspaper, A-Jumhuriya, the Internet spells “the end of civ- ilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics.”*

‘The same excessive rhetoric has surrounded specific discussions of com-

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Com-30 RANDY BASS AND ROY ROSENZWEIG

ing to a District Near You,” a sign flashes “Don’t Be Left Behind!” And the other side has similarly mobilized exaggerated forecasts of doom Sven Bir-

kerts for example, laments new media asa dire threat to essential habits of wisdom, “the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very

idea of culture.”*

‘There are some encouraging recent signs that the exaggerated prophecies

of utopia or dystopia are fading and we are beginning the more sober pro-

cess of assessing where computers, networks, and digital media (our work-

ing definition of “technology”) are and aren't useful Rather than apocalyp- tic transformation, we seem to be heading toward what Phil Agre calls the

“digestion model.” “As a new technology arises,” he observes, “various organized groups of participants in an existing institutional field selectively appropriate the technology in order to do more of what they are already doing—assimilating new technology to old roles, old practices, and old ways of thinking And yet once this appropriation takes place, the selective am- plification of particular functions disrupts the equilibrium of the existing order, giving rise to dynamics internal to the institution and the eventual emergence of a new, perhaps qualitatively different equilibrium.”*

In social studies education, we have already begun the process of “selec-

tive appropriation” of technology But before we can move to a new and better equilibrium, we need to ask some difficult questions, First, and most important, what are we trying to accomplish? Second, what approaches will work best? Third, are there dangers that we need to avoid as we selectively appropriate new technology into the social studies classroom? Fourth, how can we encourage and support the adoption and development of the best

practices?

WHY USE TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION?

Over the past five years of running technology workshops with thousands

of college and precollege teachers, we have usually begun by asking them,

“What are you doing now in your teaching that you would like to do better? What do you wish your students did more often or differently? What peda- §ogical problems are you looking to solve?" Most commonly, they say they want their students to be more engaged with learning; they want students

to construct new and better relationships to knowledge, not just represent it

‘on tests; and they want students to acquire deeper, more lasting understand-

ing of essential concepts

Such responses run counter to another public discourse about history and

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Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom 3

a body of factual material, “Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history is not a record in which any high

school can take pride,” goes a lament that anyone who follows social studies

education will find familiar It should be familiar: This particular quote comes from a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1917 As educational psychologist Sam Wineburg points out, “Considering the differ-

ences between the elite stratum of society attending high school in 1917 and the near universal enrollments of today, the stability of this ignorance inspires incredulity Nearly everything has changed between 1917 and today except for one thing: kids don’t know any history.”* Also unchanged is the persis- tent worryby schoo! boards and public officials about that seeming ignorance And yet based on our own experience, this is not the problem that most concerns those teaching in our classrooms (except insofar as curriculum standards and exams constrain innovation and flexibility); neither is the prob-

Jem that most concerns those who have studied in those classrooms, In 1994,

we undertook a nationwide study of a representative cross-section of 808

Americans (as well as additional special samples of 600 African Americans,

Mexican Americans, and Sioux Indians) that sought to uncover how Amer-

icans use and understand the past We asked a portion of our sample “to pick

one word or phrase to describe your experiences with history classes in elementary or high school.” Negative descriptions significantly outweighed

ive ones “Boring” was the single most common word offered In the

entire study, the words “boring” or “boredom” almost never appeared in descriptions of activities connected with the pursuit of the past, with the significant exception of respondents’ comments about studying history in school, where it comes up repeatedly."

‘The same point came across even more clearly when we asked respondents to identify how connected with the past they felt in seven different situations: gathering with their families, celebrating holidays, reading books, watching,

films, visiting museums or historic sites, and studying history in school Re-

spondents ranked classrooms dead last, with an average score of 5.7 on a 10-

point scale (as compared with 7.9 when they gathered with their families)

‘Whereas one-fifth of respondents reported feeling very connected with the

past in school (by giving those experiences a rank of 8 or higher), more than

two-thirds felt very connected with the past when they gathered with their

families Of course, the comparison we posed is not an entirely fair one

Schoolsare the only compulsory activity we asked about; the others are largely voluntary (although some might disagree about family gatherings) Stil, our survey finds people most detached from the past in the place that they ‘most systematically encountered it: the schools

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32 RANDY BASS AND RO ROSENZWEIG

‘To be sure, these negative comments about classroom-based history were not always reflected in remarks about specific teachers Respondents applaud- ‘ed teachers for engaging students in the study of the past through active learning A North Carolina man in his mid-twenties, for example, praised a teacher

who “got us very involved” because she “took us on various trips and we got

hands-on" history A Bronx woman similarly talked enthusiastically about

the “realism” of a class project’s engagement with an incident in Puerto Rican

history: “Everybody had different information about it, and everyone was giving different things about the same thing, so it made it very exciting,”

Although teachers could make history classrooms resemble the settings in

which respondents liked to engage the past, most Americans reported that history classrooms more often seemed to include a content that was removed from their interests and to feature memorization and regurgitation of sense- less details Respondents recalled with great vehemence how teachers had required them to memorize and regurgitate names, dates, and details that had no connection to them They often added that they forgot the details as soon as the exam had ended Such complaints could be captured in the words of

a thirty-six-year-old financial analyst from Palo Alto, California: “It was just

a giant data damp that we were supposed to memorize just numbers and names and to this day I still can’t remember them.”

Not everyone would agree with these complaints Others argue that the real problem of the schools is historical and civic illiteracy: a lack of knowl-

edge of the basic facts about history, politics, and society Our own view (and that of the teachers with whom we have worked) is that such factual knowl-

edge emerges out of active engagement with learning rather than out of text-

book- and test-driven curriculum Given that these are contentious issues, we think that it is important to acknowledge our bias up front The prob- Jem we seek to address is the one that preoccupies the teachers with whom ‘we have worked and the survey respondents with whom we talked: How can

the history classroom become a site of active learning and critical thinking?

Can technology foster those goals?

WHAT WORKS? THREE FRAMEWORKS FOR

USING TECHNOLOGY TO PROMOTE ACTIVE LEARNING

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approaches grows out of our observation of scores of teachers in workshops

sponsored by the American Studies Crossroads Project, the New Media Class-

room, and the Library of Congress's American Memory Fellows program.’ Based on these interactions, we have concluded that the most successful educational uses of digital technology fall into three broad categories:

Inquiry-based learning using primary sources available on CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web and including the exploration of multimedia environments with potentially fluid combinations of text, image, sound, and moving images in presentational and inquiry activities, involving different senses and forms of expression and addressing different learning styles

Bridging reading and writing through online interaction, extending the time and space for dialogue and learning, and joining literacy with disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry

Making student work public in new media formats, encouraging constructivist pedagogies through the creation and exchange of knowledge representations

and creating opportunities for review by broader professional and public au-

diences

Each type of activity takes advantage of particular qualities of the new media, And each type of activity is also linked to particular pedagogical strategies and goals

Inquiry Activities: The Novice in the Archive

Probably the most important influence of the availability of digital materials and computer networks has been on the development of inquiry-based exercises rooted in retrieving and analyzing primary social and cultural doc- ‘uments These range from simple Web exercises in which students must find photo that tells something about work in the late nineteenth century to

elaborate assignments in which students carefully consider how different

photographers, artists, and writers historically have treated the subject of poverty Indeed, teachers report that inquiry activities with digital materials

have been effective at all levels of the K-12 curriculum In Hillsborough,

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4 RANDY BASS AND ROY ROSENZWEIG

gradersin New York use the Works Progress Administration (WPA) life histories on line at the Library of Congress to reconstruct the worlds of immi- grants and then use photographs from online archives to illustrate these narratives in poster presentations And high school juniors in Kansas City scrutinize the “Registers of Free Blacks” at the Valley ofthe Shadow Civil War Web site not only to learn about the lives of free African Americans in the Shenandoah Valley before the Civil War but also to reflect on the uses and limitations of different kinds of digital and primary materials to achieve an understanding of the past?

‘The analysis of primary sources and the structured inquiry learning pro- «ess often used in such examinations are widely recognized as essential steps in building student interest in history and culture and helping them understand the ways in which scholars engage in research, study, and interpreta tion Primary documents give students a sense of the reality and the complexity of the past; they represent an opportunity to go beyond the predigested, seamless quality of most textbooks to engage with real people and problems ‘The fragmentary and contradictory nature of primary sources can be challenging and frustrating but also intriguing and ultimately rewarding, helping students understand the problematic nature of evidence and the constructed quality of historical and social interpretations Almost all versions

of the national standards for social studies and history published in the 1990s

have (in this regard, at leat) followed the lead of the 1994 National Standards {for United States History, which declared that “perhaps no aspect of historical thinking is as exciting to students or as productive of their growth as historical thinkers as ‘doing history’” by directly encountering “historical doc- ‘uments, eyewitness accounts, letters, diaries, artifacts, [and] photos.”

Of course, the use of primary sources and inquiry methods does not require digital tools Teachers have long used documentary anthologies and source books (often taking advantage of a somewhat less recent technolog-

ical advance, the Xerox machine) But the rise of new media and new com-

puter technology has fostered and improved inquiry-based teaching for three

key reasons

First and most obviously is the greatly enhanced access to primary sources, that CD-ROM and the Internet have made possible Almost overnight, teachers, school librarians, and students who previously had scant access to the primary materials from which scholars construct interpretations of society

and culture gained access to vast depositories of primary cultural and histor-

ical materials single Internet connection gives teachers at inner-city urban schools access to more primary source materials than the best-funded private or suburban high school in the United States Just the ninety different collec

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tions (containing about 5 million different primary documents) that the brary of Congress has made available since the mid-1990s constitute a revolution in the resources available to those who teach about American history, society, or culture And almost weekly, major additional archives are coming online These include such diverse collections as the U.S Supreme Court Multimedia Database, at Northwestern University (with its huge archive of written and audio decisions and arguments before to the Court), the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (with its searchable database of 50,000 images), and Exploring the French Revolution, at George Mason University (with its comprehensive archive of images and documents)."

For the history and social studies teacher and the school librarian, even

the most frequently criticized feature of the Web—the unfiltered presence of large amounts of junk—can be an opportunity, albeit one that must be approached with care Biased Web sites in the hands of the creative teacher are fascinating and revealing primary sources In effect, many skills traditionally taught by social studies teacher—for example, the critical evaluation of

sources—have become even more important in the online world The Web offers an exciting and authentic arena in which students can learn to become

critical consumers of information Equally important, the Web presents the

student with social knowledge used in a “real” context A student studying,

Marcus Garvey or Franklin Roosevelt through Web-based sources learns not ‘only what Garvey or Roosevelt did in the 1920s and 1930s but also what these

historical figures mean to people in the present

A second appealing feature of this new distributed cultural archive is its

multimedia character The teacher with the Xerox machine is limited to writ-

ten texts and static (and perhaps poorly copied) images Now, teachers can ‘engage their students with analyzing the hundreds of early motion pictures

placed online by the Library of Congress, the speeches and oral histories available at the National Gallery of Recorded Sound that Michigan State is begin-

ning to assemble, and hundreds of thousands of historical photographs."

Third, the digitization of documents allows students to examine them with supple electronic tools, conducting searches that facilitate and transform the

inquiry process For example, the American Memory Collection provides

search engines that operate within and across collections; if one is researching sharecropping in the thousands of interview transcripts held in the Fed-

eral Writers’ Project archive, a search can quickly find (and take you to) every mention of sharecropping in every transcri rly, searches for key

words such as race or ethnicity turn up interesting patterns and unexpected insights into the language and assumptions of the day In other words, the search engines not only help students to find what they are looking for, they

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also allow them to examine patterns of word usage and language formation within and across documents

‘These kinds of activities—searching, examining patterns, discovering con-

nections between artifacts—are all germane to the authentic thinking processes of historians and scholars of society and culture Digital media not only give flexible access to these resources but also make visible the often invisi- bie archival contexts from which interpretive meaning is derived “Everyone knows the past was wonderfully complex,” notes historian Ed Ayres “In conventional practice, historians obscure choices and compromises as we winnow evidence through finer and finer grids of note-taking, narrative, and

analysis, as the abstracted patterns take on a fixity of their own A digital

archive, on the other hand, reminds us every time we look at it of the connections we are not making, of the complications of the past.”

The combination of increased access with the development of powerful digital searching tools has the potential to transform the nature and the scale of students’ relationship to the material itself For the first time, perhaps, it allows the novice learner to get into the archives and engage in the kinds of archival activities that only expert learners used to be able to do."* Of course, the nature of their encounter with primary materials and primary processes is still as novice learners The unique opportunity with electronic, simulat-

ed archives is to create open but guided experiences for students that would

be difficult or impractical to recreate in most research library environments Italso frees students and teachers from their traditional dependence on place for first-hand social, political, or historical research Or, perhaps more im- portantly, it means that students can more readily compare their own community with others, more distant

The task of creating these open but guided experiences is demanding ‘Teachers must not only learn how to use the new technology but also spend time exploring the digital archives (perhaps in partnership with school librarians) to learn what they hold and consider what students can learn from them, Constructing effective inquiry activities demands knowledge of the topic, the documents, the archive, and the craft of introducing students to the inquiry process Implementing inquiry approachesin the classroom takes class time that teachers sometimes are reluctant to give And the inquiry process is by definition not easy to control; students are likely to come up with unanticipated answers At their best, however, new media technologies can help make the intermediate processes of historical cognition visible and accessible to learners, in part by helping students approach problem solving and knowledge making as open, revisable processes and in part by provid-

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1g tools to give teachers—as expert learners—a window into student think-

ing processes."*

Bridging Reading and Writing through Online Interaction

‘One very significant dimension of “making thinking visible” is the bridging

of reading and writing through online writing and electronic dialogue The benefits of writing and dialogue for student learning were well established

before the emergence of computers and the Internet Over the last several

decades, educators in many disciplines and at every level of education have

come to believe that meaningful education involves students not merely as

passive recipients of knowledge dispensed by the instructor but as active contributors to the learning process One of the key elements in this peda- gogy is the importance of student discussion and interaction with the instructor and with each other, which provides opportunities for students to artic-

ulate, exchange, and deepen their learning Educators in a wide range of

settings practice variations of this process

But the emergence of digital media, tools, and networks has multiplied the possibilities Electronic mail, electronic discussion lists, and Web bulletin boards can support and enhance such pedagogies by creating new spaces for

group conversations.” One of the greatest advantages to using electronic

interaction involves the writing process, which can facilitate complex think-

ing and learning and build related skills These advantages can combine with

the potential for electronic discussion to draw out students who remain si- lent in face-to-face discussion Online interaction has also proven to be effective in helping to build connections between subject-based learning and

literacy skills (reading and writing), which too often are treated separately

Online discussion tools also foster community and dialogue Active, guided dialogue helps involve students in the processes of making knowledge, test- ing and rehearsing interpretations, and communicating their ideas to oth-

ers in public ways Another advantage to online dialogue tools is in helping

students make connections beyond the classroom, whether it is enhancing

the study of regional and national history through connections with a class room elsewhere in the United States or enhancing global social studies cur-

ricula through e-mail “pen pal” programs with students elsewhere in the world, Postcard Geography isa simple project, organized through the Inter- net, in which hundreds of classes (particularly elementary school classes) Jearn geography by exchanging postcards (real and virtual, purchased and computer generated) with each other An Alabama elementary school teacher notes the galvanizing effect of the project on her rural students who “don’t

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get out of their city, let alone their state or country!" At North Hagerstown High School in Maryland, high school students mount online discussions of issues such as the crisis in Kosovo, engaging in dialogue among themselves and with more far-flung contributors, from Brooklyn to Belgrade."*

Designing Constructive Public Spaces for Learning

Closely connected to both online writing and inguiry activities is the third

dimension of our framework: the use of constructive virtual spaces as envi:

ronments for students to synthesize their reading and writing through public products As with the other uses of new technology, the advantages of public presentations of student work are well known But, here again, the new technology—particularly the emergence of the Web as a public space that is accessible to all—has greatly leveraged an existing practice Virtual environ-

ments offer many layers of public space that help make thinking visible and

lead students to develop a stronger sense of public accountability for their

ideas The creation of public, constructed projects is another manifestation

of these public pedagogies, one that engages students significantly in the

design and building of knowledge products asa critical part of the learning process

In the use of new media technologies in culture and history fields, construc-

tivist and constructionist approaches provide ways for students to make their

work public in new media spaces as part of the earning process, ranging from

the individual construction of Web pages to participation in large, ongoing collaborative resource projects that involve many students and faculty over ‘many years development.” For example, at an elementary school in Virgin- ia, fifth graders studying world cultures build a different wing of a virtual museum each year, researching and annotating cultural artifacts and then mounting them online; similarly, at a middle school in Philadelphia sixth graders worked closely with a local museum to create a CD-ROM exhibit on Mesopotamia, using images and resources from the museum's collections.”

Seventh graders in Arlington, Virginia published an online “Civil War News-

paper” with Matthew Brady photographs from the Library of Congress as well

as their own analyses of the photos." More ambitious student-constructed projects can evolve aver several years and connect students more closely to their communities as in St Ignatius, Montana, where high school students

have helped to create online community archives.”

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media and multiple voices Digital tools can represent complex connections

and relationships and make large amounts of information available and ma-

nipulable There is great potential, which we have only begun to understand,

in using digital tools for constructionist learning approaches that help students,

acquire and express the complexity of culture and history knowledge Student constructionist projects offer a potentially very rich synthesis of resources and expressive capabilities; they combine archival and database resources with conversational, collaborative, and dialogic tools, in digital contexts character-

ized by hypertext and other modes for discovering and representing relation-

ships between knowledge objects

WHAT TO AVOID?:

HAZARDS ALONG THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIERS

‘These are all appealing goals, and there is some encouraging but preliminary

experience to suggest that technology can help us achieve them But it would

be foolish, if not dangerous, to suggest that technology is a panacea for the problems of history education or that any of these approaches is easy to implement Indeed, the most serious danger of introducing technology into the classroom is the mistaken assumption that it, alone, can transform education ‘The single-minded application of technological solutions to teaching will as

surely be as much of a disaster as the application of single-minded solutions

to agriculture or forest management As the first generation of scientific for-

esters learned, any change in a complex environment must be thought about ecologically.” New technologically enhanced approaches, whether inquiry-

based learning or student constructionist exercises, must be carefully intro- duced within the context of existing teaching approaches and existing courses and assignments What assignments are already working well? How will anew assignment alter the overall balance of a course? How do new approaches manifest themselves throughout a curriculum or a school?

By asking these questions, we should be also reminding ourselves to use

technology only where it makes a clear contribution to classroom learning

Some teaching strategies work better with traditional materials A teacher who

has students post rules of historical significance on butcher paper around the

classroom may find that their visual presence is stronger on the classroom walls than on the class Web site More generally, technology generally is better used to provide a deeper understanding of some pivotal issues through inquiry and constructionist assignments rather than being pressed into ser- vice to respond to standards-based pressures for coverage

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